Collaboration and Organisational Structure: Moving Beyond the Familiar
Written by Esteban Fernandez Drovetta and Jules Harrison-Annear
When Organisational Design Becomes the Barrier to Change
In twenty-five years of change work across the New Zealand and UK governments, General Motors, Bank of America, and the Catalyst Projects we now run through JERICA, we've both sat in a lot of rooms where the real problem is named last.
The meeting starts with a process issue, or a delivery gap, or a technology question. But what's underneath it, if you stay long enough, is almost always the same thing: an organisation doing what it's always done, in conditions that have fundamentally changed, and struggling to understand why it's no longer working.
There's a saying that keeps surfacing in these conversations, the one about repeating the same actions and expecting different results. It's overused, but it's pointing at something real. Most organisations don't lack capability. They lack permission (internal permission, cultural permission) to see their situation differently and act on what they find.
That's what this article is about. Not innovation as a product feature or a strategy deck. Innovation as the willingness to look clearly at what's in front of you and move differently.
“In my experience, the leaders who communicate most effectively in difficult moments are the ones who are willing to say: here's what I know, here's what I don't, here's what we're doing and why, and here's how I want us to stay in contact as this develops.“
The Organisational Risk of Structural Inaction
Risk assessment in most organisations is still oriented toward the wrong question.
The dominant approach asks: what could go wrong if we act? The more important question, the one that tends not to appear on the risk register, is: what is already going wrong because we haven't?
This matters particularly now. The pressures most organisations are navigating — environmental disruption, shifting workforce expectations, cascading technological change — aren't theoretical future risks. They're present conditions. The climate-related pressures that organisations once modelled as future scenarios are already reshaping supply chains, infrastructure, and the communities their people live in. Inequalities in indigenous communities’ outcomes that sit on some organisations' risk registers as potential exposure are, for the people experiencing them, simply the shape of daily life.
When risk is framed only as something to be mitigated, it creates a particular kind of organisational paralysis. Leaders wait for better information, cleaner conditions, cheaper alternatives. Governments and large industries wait for green technology to become more affordable before committing to transition. What gets lost in the waiting is the adaptation that could already be underway — the operating model flexibility, the decision-making agility, the relationships that take years to build and can't be conjured when the pressure finally lands.
We see this pattern in the Catalyst Projects. The organisations that navigate disruption best are rarely the ones who predicted it most accurately. They're the ones that started moving earlier, built the capacity and courage to adjust, and weren't caught rigid when conditions shifted.
Waiting for perfect conditions is its own decision, with its own consequences.
What Collaboration-Ready Operating Models Actually Need
Innovation tends to get attached to technology, to product launches, to the new. In practice, the most significant innovations we've seen in organisations are much quieter than that.
They're changes in how decisions get made. Who's in the room. What questions are considered legitimate. Whether the people closest to the problem are empowered to name what they're seeing.
That kind of innovation requires something most change programmes don't explicitly build: mental space. The capacity to step back from constant delivery, to sit with a question long enough to see it differently, to let an idea develop before immediately converting it into a plan.
This is harder than it sounds in high-pressure environments. When teams are operating at full stretch (functioning, making decisions, getting through), there's rarely room for the kind of thinking that produces genuinely different approaches. The difference between productive pressure and the kind that closes thinking down is not always visible until it's already happened.
In practice, this means that creating the conditions for innovation isn't separate from managing workload and capacity. You can't ask people to think differently about a system while simultaneously asking them to absorb every demand that system produces. Those two things are in direct tension, and pretending otherwise doesn't resolve it.
Building Collaboration Into Organisational Structure, Not Just Culture
Collaboration has become a word that gets used so frequently it risks meaning nothing. So it's worth being specific about what it actually does, and what it requires.
Working across organisations, sectors, and communities does things that working within them can't. It surfaces assumptions you can't see from inside your own system. It brings capability to problems that exceed what any single organisation can carry. It creates the conditions for the kind of trust that makes genuine coordination possible when conditions deteriorate fast.
We saw this in the response to Covid-19. Barriers between government, non-profit, and private sectors that had seemed structural dissolved quickly when the situation demanded it. That's worth holding onto. Not because crisis is the model, but because it proves the barriers were never fixed. They're choices. And the conditions we're navigating now — ecological, social, economic — make a strong case for making different choices before the next emergency, not during it.
In the Catalyst Projects, collaboration isn't incidental to the work. It's central to it. The Reef Voices project is built on it. The Fellowship is structured around it. The reason isn't philosophical — it's practical. The problems worth working on are too complex, too interconnected, and too consequential for any single organisation's perspective to be sufficient.
But genuine collaboration also requires something that organisations often underestimate: the willingness to have your thinking challenged. Collaboration that only confirms existing assumptions isn't collaboration. It's coordination. The value is in the friction — the perspective you wouldn't have had, the risk you couldn't see, the solution that emerges from the combination rather than from any one contributor.
Why Competitive Systems Are No Longer Fit for Purpose
There's a deeper question underneath all of this, one we think about in the context of the Catalyst Projects and in the broader systems work JERICA does.
The logic of competition — that individual actors pursuing their own interests produces optimal collective outcomes — made a kind of sense in a world of abundance. It makes considerably less sense in a world of compounding constraint.
We are not, in fact, in competition with each other for survival in the way that framing suggests. The conditions for human survival and flourishing are shared. The biodiversity we've spent centuries treating as a resource is the system we depend on. The communities whose inequalities appear on risk registers are the same communities those organisations need to function and have purpose.
This isn't a moral argument, though it is that too. It's a practical one. The organisations and leaders that will navigate the next twenty years most effectively will be the ones that orient around regeneration rather than extraction. The ones that ask not what they can take from the systems they operate in, but what they can contribute back.
That shift requires collaboration. It requires a different relationship to risk. And it requires the kind of innovation that starts not with a new product but with a genuinely different question about what the organisation is here to do - its why.
Leading Collaborative Change When the Pressure Is On
If you're leading in this environment, you're probably already holding the tension we’re describing. Between the immediate pressure to deliver and the longer-term responsibility to build something that lasts. Between what the current model requires and what a different future demands.
There's no clean resolution to that tension. But there is a direction.
It starts with taking the real risks seriously — including the risks of not moving. It involves building collaborative relationships before the crisis arrives. And it means creating enough space in the organisation, and in your own thinking, for innovation to actually happen rather than just appear on the strategy slide.
The next move is yours. If it helps to think this through with someone, we'd be glad to walk beside you.
FAQ on Collaboration and Organisational Structure
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Usually because the conditions for genuine innovation — mental space, psychological safety, diverse perspectives, permission to question existing assumptions — aren't actually present. Innovation gets added to the agenda without the structural changes that would make it possible. The result is innovation as performance rather than practice.
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Most risk frameworks are oriented toward future threats to be mitigated. They're less equipped to reckon with risks that are already present, or with the risk of inaction itself. Waiting for better conditions before acting is a choice with consequences that don't always appear on the register.
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For certain purposes, in certain contexts. But as a primary organising logic for how organisations relate to each other and to the systems they depend on, it's increasingly inadequate. The problems worth solving — ecological, social, systemic — are shared. They require collaboration, not competition.
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More than agreement and coordination. Genuine collaboration requires the willingness to have your perspective challenged, to work with people whose starting assumptions differ from yours, and to trust that the outcome of that friction will be better than what any one party would have produced alone. That's uncomfortable. It's also where the value is.
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With difficulty, and deliberately. The capacity to innovate isn't separate from questions of workload and pace. If teams are constantly at full stretch absorbing every demand the system produces, there's no space for the thinking that produces genuinely different approaches. There are choices everyday not just in the what organisations are busy doing, but in the how and the how fast. Creating that space is a leadership decision, not a circumstance.
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